Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk- Song

I immediately connected with Christina Rossetti's Song. I took it to mean that there are some things that should never be forgotten, but that shouldn't consume your thoughts. For instance in the first stanza she writes, "And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget." The person may be dead but their life need not be dwelt upon. There are other things for people to do in their lives besides contemplating a death of a loved one, no matter how sad that death may be, so remember that person and keep them in your heart, but move on. Besides, to sound really pessimistic, they are already dead; no amount of mourning is ever going to bring that person back. That is in fact another reason why the dead person tells her dearest not to mourn; since she is dead, she will never receive that affection.
I believe this can be seen in the later lines as well: "Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget." Since she is dead and mourning is useless, the dearest should forget her and move on. However, they should remember enough to keep the memory of the person alive. In other words, the dearest should remember enough to not forget the dead, but forget enough to not continually mourn over her needlessly. In essence, I took this as a more in depth version of the saying "Don't cry over spilled milk." It's in the past and it can't be changed, so there's no use worrying about it.

Dover Beach and Life

Matthew's Arnold's Dover Beach was not an easy, convenient read; it took me a good number of tries to figure it out. It starts out with a beautiful description of the Strait of Dover, then turns into a what seems to be a struggle. It seems to change subjects almost instantly which doesn't make it any easier to comprehend. The small little biography of Arnold in the back of the anthology wasn't much help either. (It's only three sentences long. I actually counted). Thus, I started to tear it apart.
I started with the end, since that's where the struggle and frustration of the poem seemed to be, and worked my way forwards, piecing it together from there. I came up with a message that, after my analysis now seems rather blatant: life really isn't all that glorious. On lines thirty through thirty thirty three, Arnold writes, "For the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light." I interpreted this to mean what I wrote previously: the world may seem nice, but it's really not. I think that's why Arnold started out with a soothing description of the Strait of Dover. He makes it seem lovely and wonderful, prepared to tear it down in the following stanzas. Not to mention, his last lines: "And we are here as on darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night." I believe most of us are confused. We don't know why we're here or why life just has to be so frustratingly hard at times; it's definitely not beautiful as it may visually appear to be.
How did you all interpret the poem? Did you see it the same way or as something completely different?

Feminism Critique Critique

I had trouble reading the feminist criticism of "The Dead," the problem being that I don't fully understand feminism. I understand feminism in the sense that women and men are not equal in society, because they truly aren't, and that feminists strive to lessen that inequality, but the way feminists go about it have always dumbfounded me. Honestly, I feel like feminism is sometimes just a way for women (and sometimes men) to complain about petty things. Sometimes, they make something people probably wouldn't normally deem sexist, sexist. I believe they do it just to call attention to themselves sometimes. For instance, on page 179 of "The Dead" French criticism is defined by how feminists interpret language and they continue to say that language is male dominated. Honestly though, who cares? It was a language created a long time ago by a male dominated society. Why wouldn't they make higher valued words masculine? However, by blatantly coming out and saying that they're masculine nouns and thus a masculine language that should require female language counterpart, feminists are giving them more power. It's like surrounding a celebrity who just got busted for drugs with article after article and tons of publicity. With all the attention they're getting, they're just getting more power. Without the attention, they would just pass through the wind and no one would really think of anything of it because it wouldn't matter without they hype.
Enough about that though, before this post gets annoyingly long and turns into my complete critique of feminism. On page 196, Margot Norris talks about the scene where Gabriel turns Gretta into a painting and a symbol. If I understood the paragraph correctly, Norris says that men become so in love with their perfect version of a woman that they can't stand to be with a real one. From my previous paragraph critiquing feminism you may already be able to tell why this bothered me so much: he made a real life women into a painting in his head and didn't just pull a fictional woman from thin air. Gabriel thought Gretta was so interesting on the stairs that he decided to make her a painting in his head. In my opinion that's not male over female; that's flattering. If a man told me he thought I was pretty and interesting enough to make a picture out of, I would be ecstatic. That's a great compliment, but Norris takes it as more of an insult. Even with her explaining that she compared it to the Pygmalion myth, I still don't understand it. As said earlier, Gabriel turned Gretta, a real life woman, into a picture in his head because she thought he was beautiful and interesting, but the myth was an artist just forming a sculpture from his head with no regard to real women. These are complete opposites, the latter being more an insult to women while the former is really a compliment. Therefore, I don't understand the basis of the comparison. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm half asleep or because I've gotten myself so worked up over feminism in my previous paragraph, but I just can't wrap my head around such a comparison. It just doesn't make sense to me and makes it harder for me to understand the rest of Norris' paper because my mind just won't stop jumping back to that comparison. So what do you all think? Do you think the comparison makes sense? If you do, would care to explain it to me?